Well I haven't had time to make anything at all yet other than writing down a few notes. If I get a chance to make a game it will probably be a platformer starring mammals, but I won't say more than that.

Managed to work on rather mundane inner workings. Scripting is now working, also level win check and prepare next level are implemented. Currently trying to add lots of diverse obstacles, as the gameplay is not really difficult at all.

I wish I were unemployed again so I could dedicate full time for this competition, but can't make an entry. The posted ones look awesome, so one eye is crying and the other is laughing. The third is itching at the moment because of this cursed allergy.

So not much progress since my last update, I've been otherwise busy and progress has been slow, but I've got a few new things done:

Granny can now shoot in the direction of the mouse

Dino has health, takes damage from shots and will eventually die (by abruptly being replaced a bloodsplat sprite, without any transition at the moment).

Granny also has health, and her death is detected but currently nothing happens when she dies.

Fixed a few physics bugs and granny can now only jump if she's grounded (no mid-air jumping) - This took way too long to do!

I have a bit of time this evening so hopefully I can pick off at least some of the next few things on my todo:

Infinitely auto-generating flooring

Auto-spawning dinos.

Gameover gamestate

Scoring & score-counter

Once those things are done then I actually have the bare minimum requirements for the game, so I'll have a contest entry to submit even if it's really basic. Everything else is just polish: more guns, more dinos, health-bars, highscore table, sprite animation, particle-systems, etc.

We forgot to update yesterday due to a hectic schedule but here is a little update of the last two days.

This morning, we changed our view on the look of the game and chose to not make the game in the pixel style but instead use a mix of drawings and pixel art. This actually improved our workflow and work is progressing steadily.

Most of our art assets and game mechanics are complete. A lot more work to go but here is just a break down of two days work:

Movement system

Interaction system with NPC's and talking

Item pick up and inventory system

Door system / Teleportation

Start of the music

Background art for 4 different areas complete

First sequence of the game complete

We are roughly more than half way through but we still have to implement the rest of the story, finish the music and finalise adding assets into the game and a few special scripted events.

Got some time to post an update on where I am from last nights progress + bits here and there from today. It's finally looking more like a game:

Dinos spawn periodically from both sides - At the moment it's a fixed 5-second frequency so I still need to balance the spawn rate and it needs to get more rapid as Granny progresses.

The terrain is now infinitely generating and granny can only progress towards the right. I've even been a good citizen and cleaned up the resources once they get clipped off the left hand side. Although since the dinos spawn off-screen they do need some kind of ground to land on so there is actually an entry-ramp created for them. Preventing granny from travelling left-wards is done just by adding a large invisible wall to the left; it'll only block granny, the dinos can pass straight through.

I seem to have fixed all my physics related bugs. I had to change to using smooth capsules for granny & the dinos because box2d is not happy to let squares (characters) slide over sequences of squares (the terrain). I gather box2d supports the notion of edge-shapes with "ghost vertices" to support this use-case and I actually wasted some time going off in that direction but it turns out libgdx doesn't currently support the ghost-vertices on edge-shapes, which is a crying shame.

I also had an occasional crash which I worked out through trial-and-error occurred because I was multiply destroying box2d bodies when a bullet collided with >1 dinosaur at once. Since the problem would emanate from within box2d (which is native code wrapped in JNI) it would just completely topple the JVM, seemingly with no exception details or anything - I don't know if there's a good way to handle or debug this kind of thing in general?

You'll also spot I have font-rendering (not my font though but I'll ship the license - free for personal and commercial use). The score calculation is currently just: distance + 10*kills. That probably won't do, better to promote right-ward travel and have the dinos be a hindrance to that so maybe it should be: 10*distance+kills. I'll have to think a bit more on that one.

One final thing to do before the game is bare-minimally complete and that's to handle game-over. After that I'll look at adding soundFX, music and better visuals.